Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation of Collective Neutrino Oscillations

Understand

It is well known that the neutrino flavor in extreme astrophysical environments changes under the effect of three contributions: the vacuum oscillation, the interaction with the surrounding matter, and the collective oscillations due to interactions between different neutrinos.

• The latter adds a non-linear contribution to the equations of motion, making the description of their dynamics complex.
• In this work we study various strategies to simulate the coherent collective oscillations of a system of N neutrinos in the two-flavor approximation using quantum computation.
• This was achieved by using a pair-neutrino decomposition designed to account for the fact that the flavor Hamiltonian, in the presence of the neutrino-neutrino term, presents an all-to-all interaction that makes the implementation of the evolution dependent on the qubit topology.